Central Asia has spent three years signing things. Memoranda with Washington and Brussels, strategic partnership frameworks, a joint investment framework with Uzbekistan in February, a ministerial that drew 54 countries. The diplomacy is real. The funded, operating mines and refineries are harder to find.
The numbers explain why this matters. By the Oxus Society’s count, China takes roughly half of the critical minerals exported from Central Asia, and by other measures as much as 70 percent of selected minerals. China is also the largest foreign investor in the region’s mining and holds most of the permits in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The EU’s share of these exports sits around 6 percent.
Set against that, the Western flagship is a single tungsten project in Kazakhstan, the Cove Capital and Tau-Ken Samruk venture worth about $1.1 billion, still waiting on letters of interest from the US Export-Import Bank and the Development Finance Corporation. The headline figure of $64 billion in deals that Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan signed with American firms in late 2025 turns out, on inspection, to be mostly purchases of American goods: Boeing jets, locomotives, John Deere machinery. Money flowing the other way, into Central Asian rock, is thin.
China still takes the majority of Central Asia’s critical-mineral exports. The West’s share is measured in single digits.
The point others skip is where the value sits. Shipping raw ore is low-margin and leaves the processing, and the profit, to China. The opening for Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan is to build midstream capacity, refining and intermediate products, rather than dig and export. That runs into two walls the communiqués rarely mention: power and governance. Mining already accounts for 69 percent of Kazakhstan’s industrial energy use, and the grid upgrades the sector needs have been costed at $25 billion to $49 billion.
So the bottleneck is not the supply of signatures. It is bankability, electricity and the willingness of Western lenders to finance projects in jurisdictions where China holds the infrastructure. Until that changes, the agreements will keep multiplying and the export map will keep pointing east.